What's your way out?

"Please, dear God, don't let me [screw] up.""To come this far…and [screw] up…."—The imagined thoughts of Alan B. Shepard as he awaited his launch in the first manned space shot in the Mercury program, as written by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff.
http://www.aopa.org/members/files/pilot/2000/escape0008.html

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Radar services for VFR pilots

All You Have To Do is Ask...
http://www.aopa.org/members/ftmag/article.cfm?article=108

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Avoiding The Blue Airport Blues

Like many students who learn to fly at a nontowered airport, my only experience with air traffic control was when I had to make the required takeoffs and landings at an airport with a control tower. Communicating with a controller was unfamiliar - intimidating even. After I earned my private certificate, I spent my first hundred or so hours avoiding controlled airports.
http://www.aopa.org/members/ftmag/article.cfm?article=1613

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Medical certification

The current funding challenge at the FAA is doing little to improve the response times for issuance of medical authorizations. First-time special issuances in particular are taking at least 120 days to be cleared. However, AOPA is aware of some reissuances of existing authorizations being delayed as well. The FAA is currently under a hiring freeze, and reductions in staffing levels of key positions at the Aerospace Medical Certification Division in Oklahoma City, including Legal Instrument Reviewers who review many of the cases flowing through the system, will exist for some time yet. In addition, one of the staff physicians has been recalled to active military duty.
http://www.aopa.org/members/resources/medical.html

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Ground Track In The Pattern

One of the few incontrovertible facts in aviation is that the ground never moves (California excepted). So, regardless of what kind of sophisticated electronic gadgetry you've stuffed into your airplane's panel, it can't tell you any more than the ground can. Look down, see where the airplane is going; if it isn't right, change it. Seems pretty basic, doesn't it? That's why just about everyone spends a good part of the first five hours of flight training out in the boondocks flying rectangular patterns around a cornfield. Later on, we do S turns across a road and turns around a point. All of this is to teach us how to counteract the effects of wind on the track we're making across the ground. By the time we're about 20 hours into our training, however, the only discussion of ground track is related to navigation and, even then, it is mentioned only in passing.
http://www.aopa.org/members/ftmag/article.cfm?article=4106

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